In a Wall Street Journal article, the idea that women may make better beer tasters (primarily at the big industrial brewers where it’s vitally important that each batch taste the same as the previous thousands) is explored.

No glass ceiling for the best job in the world

At many companies, the assembled panelists would have been men, typically brew masters and other technical types. And it makes sense. To judge from TV commercials, men like beer better than women do and sometimes even seem to like beer more than they like women.

But the British company SABMiller PLC decided several years ago to reach deeper into its employee pool to find adept tasters, inviting marketers, secretaries and others to try their hand. The company concluded that women were drinking men under the table.

“We have found that females often are more sensitive about the levels of flavor in beer,” says Barry Axcell, SABMiller’s chief brewer. Women trained as tasters outshine their male counterparts, he says.

Honestly, this doesn’t surprise me at all. My wife has a much more sensitive nose than I do. (Which she reminds me of all of the time, often right before she reminds me to clean the cat boxes.) I often ask her to sniff a beer I’m sampling to see if she picks up something more subtle than I have been able to detect.